Andre Oboler and Gerald Steinberg, Bar-Ilan University and NGO Monitor
Rephael Stern, Brandeis University and NGO Monitor
Abstract: This paper introduces criticism elimination, a type of information removal leading to a framing effect that impairs Wikipedia‟s delivery of a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and ultimately facilitates a new form of gatekeeping with political science and information technology implications. Continue reading
(Jul. 10, 2010) A panel criticizes the Climategate scientists for being defensive and unhelpful, for withholding data, for providing misleading information, for having been “blinded … to the possibility of merit” in the claims of their critics. Continue reading
Examination of Witnesses (Question
Numbers 120-139)
PROFESSOR EDWARD ACTON AND PROFESSOR PHIL JONES
1 MARCH 2010
Q120 Dr
Harris: You would not object to sending peer reviewers or editors that
data?
Professor
Jones: No, but they have never asked.
Q121 Dr
Harris: Okay. Moving on to something else, there is this whole “hide
the decline” business I want to talk to you about. There was a concession
from at least one set of critics that the “trick” is probably not an
issue because they recognise that it is a term used.
Professor
Jones: It is the best way of doing it.
Q122 Dr
Harris: It may not be the view of all of your critics but at least you have
some on the record saying that that is now not the issue. But then you will
recall there was an exchange I had, if you were listening, with them about this
question of hiding the decline and I just wanted you to respond to their
assertion that when you did that it was not set out in the publications—I must
say I have not gone back to the publications to read them so I am relying on
your view on this but I am sure it can be done—and that in fact it was never shown
that this was going on. Whereas your evidence from the UEA says very clearly
that this is part of the published scientific record that you were doing it and
the reasons you were doing that, and that can be criticised or agreed with by
other scientists. Can you just talk about that?
Professor
Jones: That particular email relates to this document that I produced
for the World Meteorological Organisation at the end of the last millennium in
1999. One of the curves was based on tree ring data which showed a very good
relationship between the tree rings and the temperature from the latter part of
the nineteenth century through to 1960, and after that there was a divergence
where the trees did not go up as much as the real temperatures had. We knew
that because we had written a paper the year before in 1998 in the journal Nature
which discussed this divergence between tree growth and temperatures in recent
times. Not all tree ring series show that but this particular one we knew did,
so we knew that putting the tree ring series in from 1960 onwards would be
wrong because it does not agree with the instrumental temperature. What we did
for this simplified diagram was to put the instrumental data on the end from
1960, so that only applies to one of these curves on this cover. We had written
about it the year before, in one of the first papers on the divergence
problem—I think other groups had actually called it the divergence problem—and,
since then, we have been working with other tree ring data trying to improve
the way we process the data to try and make sure we keep as much of the low
frequency information on longer timescales in the trees because you have to
standardise trees in a certain way to produce temperature reconstructions.
Q123 Dr
Harris: My question is: in subsequent papers when that was done was it
always explicit, albeit only by reference to the Nature paper to which
you were referring?
Professor
Jones: It was always explicit in the subsequent papers because some of
the subsequent papers have improved the processing techniques.
Q124 Dr
Harris: Did you understand what those witnesses (if you heard them) meant
when they said that they could not see, they thought the hiding of the decline
approach—which is a label from an email—the identifying and dealing with the
divergence problem, was itself hidden. You do not accept that?
Professor
Jones: We do not accept it was hidden because it was discussed in a
paper the year before and we have discussed it in every paper we have written
on tree rings and climate.
Q125 Dr
Harris: While I have you on trees, if I may, an assertion was made by the
first panel that all the data on trees before a previous date relates to one
pine tree. I would like to call this “the case of the lonesome pine”;
is that a problem from your perspective?
Professor
Jones: No, it is not a problem at all. That particular reconstruction
went back to 1400, or just after 1400, and that is because there are
insufficient trees to go back before that, there are more than just one. We
have criteria to determine how far you can go back in terms of the number of
trees you have at a certain number of sites.
Q126 Dr
Harris: It is not lonesome.
Professor
Jones: No.
Q127 Graham
Stringer: Professor Acton—you have probably read about it—the Speaker in
this place lost his job partly because he seemed to think it was more important
to pursue people who had leaked MPs’ expenses rather than deal with the issue
which seemed to show some problems in the way members had claimed the expenses.
Do you not think that your assertions and your submission to this Committee are
going along the same line as being very concerned with the leaks and then
prejudging the outcome of the inquiry in what you say?
Professor
Acton: I hope not. The point of setting up the independent inquiry is
to hear it and allow it to look absolutely fully into all the matters before
it. I want to know the full truth; I am surprised you find a prejudging here
and I am concerned.
Q128 Graham
Stringer: The reason I say that is there is a statement from your
Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Trevor Davies, who argues exactly the case that Professor
Jones has been arguing, that Professor Jones has no case to answer and the only
way you can read your submission to this Committee is to say that you agree
with Professor Jones.
Professor
Acton: Do you mean about the climate science?
Q129 Graham
Stringer: Yes.
Professor
Acton: Ah. Muir Russell’s independent review is not looking at the
science, it is looking at allegations about malpractice. As for the science
itself, I have not actually seen any evidence of any flaw in the science but I
am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the
science and make sure there is nothing wrong. It is amongst the most thoroughly
endorsed and co-witnessed science there is. Professor Jones has 450 co-authors
from 100 universities—from Princeton, from Yale, from Columbia, from Imperial,
from Oxford—there could be scarcely more prestigious and completely autonomous
scientists endorsing it. I am a historian, it would be extraordinary for me to
cast doubt on it.
Q130 Graham
Stringer: I meant both actually, both the science and the procedures that
had been followed, because one of the things you have said in your memorandum
is that the Information Commissioner said that no “breach of the law has
been established”, but the letter from the Commissioner states “the
prima facie evidence from the published emails indicates an attempt to defeat
disclosure by deleting information”. It is hard to imagine a more
clear-cut or cogent prima facie piece of evidence, is it not, and yet you have
taken the opposite view? You have supported the science—I accept the fact that
you are not a scientist—but you have also supported the administrative process
and that is rather prejudging it.
Professor
Acton: May I comment because I am rather puzzled about the statement
from the ICO because, as I understand it, our principle is that prima facie
evidence is evidence which on the face of it and without investigation suggests
that there is a case to answer. To my mind there is prima facie evidence; why
else did I set up the Muir Russell independent review? Prima facie evidence is
not the same as, “you have been found to breach”. You explain it to
me if you would; I am very puzzled. If it is sub judice, if, as we had in a
letter 10 days ago from the ICO, the investigation has not even begun, I am
puzzled how we could have been found to breach if there has been no
investigation.[5]
Q131 Graham
Stringer: That is not what you said actually, you did not say that this is
yet to be judged, what you said is: this statement “indicated that no
breach of the law has been established”. That is you prejudging the case.
Professor
Acton: It has not been established—unless there has been an
investigation.
Q132 Graham
Stringer: Would it not have been better to say that?
Professor
Acton: I have tried to, rather succinctly. To establish is to have done
an investigation.
Q133 Graham
Stringer: Can I ask you a more general question on your attitude? I was
trying, perhaps not very successfully, to draw an analogy with our problems in
this place with the Speaker. Should you not actually have been delighted that
all these emails have been released? On one of the most important scientific
issues of our age, is it not really important that we have as much information
out there as possible?
Professor
Acton: It is, and I would think that one should go well beyond the
Freedom of Information Act, the issue is so important. Once it is in the minds
of some people, once they imagine there is a conspiracy to distort, then any
refusal of information, even if it is nothing to do with data but private
emails or commercial agreements, will feed that. I am longing for it to be
completely open but whether it is a good thing that the emails are thrown open
like that, I wait to judge. That there be much more public debate, I delight in
and I thoroughly agree with. I am anxious if the effect of the way in which it
is reported is disinformation, a sort of hint about something where there is
absolutely nothing hidden. It is in a way the most deeply confirmed and affirmed,
the major issue of a temperature graph from about 1850. The early medieval
period—we should be spending more money on that research, but the latter is so
overly endorsed by scientists I am puzzled that we should welcome a savouring
of doubt where scientists say “but there is no doubt”.
Q134 Graham
Stringer: Can you tell us how you came to choose Sir Muir Russell to run
this inquiry?
Professor
Acton: I took counsel from very senior figures, including those in
higher education, about somebody who would have knowledge of university life,
real experience of public life and command enormous respect for their
integrity, preferably whom I had never met. Muir Russell was the top name that
came to mind and I was delighted when he agreed to do it.
Q135 Graham
Stringer: Thank you. Can I go back to Professor Jones? I do not want to
repeat the previous exchange we had but I just would like to be clear in terms
of the answers to the questions from Doug and Evan about the repeatability of
the works you put out. You are saying very clearly that on a lot of the papers
you have put out other scientists, not that they need your working books,
cannot repeat that work when those papers are published because they do not
have the programs and the codes?
Professor
Jones: They have not got the programs or the data.
Q136 Graham
Stringer: So they cannot without that?
Professor
Jones: That is just a fact of life in climate sciences.
Q137 Graham
Stringer: That is very plain. Dr Graham-Cumming has made a number of
points: that it appeared that your organisation, writing the different codes
that it did, did not adhere to the standards one might find in professional
software engineering and that the code had easily identified bugs—he himself
claims to have identified bugs in the programs even after the BBC2
programme—that no visible test method was apparently used and they were poorly
documented. Is that true, is Dr Graham-Cumming right?
Professor
Jones: Those codes are from a much earlier time, they are from the
period about 2000 to 2004. The codes that were stolen were earlier and we have
people working on these at the moment, trying to do some other work, but they
do not relate to the production of the global and hemispheric temperature
series. They are nothing to do with that, they are to do with a different
project.
Q138 Graham
Stringer: Which project are they to do with, so that it is clear to us?
Professor
Jones: They are to do with a project that was funded by the British
Atmospheric Data Centre, which is run by NERC, and that was to produce more
gridded temperature data and precipitation data and other variables. A lot of
that has been released on a Dutch website and also the BADC website.
Q139 Graham
Stringer: Have you now released the actual code used for CRUTEM3?
Professor
Jones: The Met Office have, they have released their version.
Andre Oboler, Gerald Steinberg and Rephael Stern
Journal of Information Technology and Politics
July 10, 2010
Andre Oboler and Gerald Steinberg, Bar-Ilan University and NGO Monitor
Rephael Stern, Brandeis University and NGO Monitor
Abstract: This paper introduces criticism elimination, a type of information removal leading to a framing effect that impairs Wikipedia‟s delivery of a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and ultimately facilitates a new form of gatekeeping with political science and information technology implications. This paper demonstrates a systematic use of criticism elimination and categorizes the editors responsible into four types. We show some types use criticism elimination to dominated and manipulated articles to advocate political and ideological agendas. We suggest mitigation approaches to criticism elimination. The research is interdisciplinary and based on empirical analysis of the public edit histories.
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
July 10, 2010
A panel criticizes the Climategate scientists for being defensive and unhelpful, for withholding data, for providing misleading information, for having been “blinded … to the possibility of merit” in the claims of their critics.
‘Panel in Britain clears scientists of misconduct allegations in ‘Climate-gate’,” read the Washington Post headline, one of many describing a vindication of the Climategate scientists at East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit in the U.K. Other press outlets saw the panel’s finding differently: “Clouds of doubt still hang over climate scientists,” the Calgary Herald’s headline stated.
The conflicting takes by the press are understandable. The British panellists, established by East Anglia University, saw too little evidence to declare the Climategate scientists at CRU guilty on most counts, and they saw too much to be always confident of their innocence.
But here’s another take on the same report, and another headline, that almost all newspapers would agree to: “Panel recognizes that the science is not settled on climate change.”
The panel’s weighty 160-page report, The Independent Climate Change Emails Review, deals overwhelmingly with one theme: How best to conduct a scientific debate? The report does not attempt to judge whether the Climategate scientists were right or wrong on the science; it judges the behaviour of the scientists and of the Climatic Research Unit that they worked at, and then suggests reforms for the scientific establishment as a whole, in effect using Climategate as a case history.
The 160-page document assesses how the Climategate scientists behaved when confronted with controversies that they had among themselves, such as whether they truly believed that we’re living in times of unprecedented warmth. The document also assesses how the Climategate scientists behaved in their disagreements with top scientists in the skeptic camp, and how they behaved when they had controversies with non-scientists.
The report, in other words, dissects the nature of the scientific debate over global warming — the word “debate” appears more than 50 times in the report. “In its successive assessment reports, the IPCC has sought to achieve a scientific consensus, but many continue to challenge the basis of its work and its conclusions, it states. The IPCC’s failure to establish a consensus led to a debate that “became highly polarized in websites, journals and conferences across the world. As a result, the work conducted by CRU became the focus of intense scrutiny and challenge, with multiple demands from both fellow scientists and laymen for background information and data.”
The global warming debate, the report makes clear, is real and legitimate, conducted by respectable parties who have every right to challenge the science and to hold the climate science establishment accountable.
The panellists criticize the Climategate scientists for being defensive and unhelpful, for withholding data, for providing misleading information, for hiding behind claims of peer review science, for having been “blinded … to the possibility of merit” in the claims of their critics, for needlessly exacerbating antagonism among the parties through their behaviour, and even for breaking the law. The conduct of the Climategate scientists, the panellists decided, not only brought them and their university into disrepute, but it also harmed the cause of science.
“Public trust in science depends on an inherent culture of honesty, rigour and transparency,” the panelists decided, adding that “an open culture will also lead to the best science.”
Most of all, the report provides a blueprint for acting honourably in the Age of the Internet, stressing “the importance of capturing the range of viewpoints” by being open and helpful rather than defensive and obstructionist. “Like it or not,” it says, “this indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century.”
(July 9, 2010) A recent announcement that 50 members of Congress are opposed to growing imports from Canada’s “filthy” oil sands is a matter that can only be addressed by a federal, not provincial, government initiative—using data that Eddy Isaacs in the government of Alberta can provide. The problem appears to be, however, that our federal team does not know where and how they are supposed to be entering the US Congressional dialogue.
Canadian negotiators need to participate directly in what is essentially a legal process, not just a political one. By putting the correct data on the table, the Canadian negotiators can create a situation in which the US Supreme Court would defeat Congressional opposition—if it gets that far.
The answer is not just competent lobbing.
The Canadian team should make it abundantly clear that Canadian interests with US assets will challenge any Congressional attempt to discriminate against oil sands output in US courts. The US Supreme Court is obliged to and has a history of striking down any law that is discriminatory that is not based on good science.
The GHG intensity of all US heavy oil—2/3 of oil produced in the state of California, for example—is much higher than all of the output from the Alberta oil sands. So the US SC would have to strike down any legislation/regulation that discriminates against oil imports from Alberta if it does not at least equally discriminate against California heavy oil producers.
Canada’s representatives in the US should make it very clear, at the soonest possible opportunity, that they will pursue legal remedies in US courts—not just WTO or NAFTA tribunals—if diplomacy does not work. I find in US situations, it is essential to present firm knowledge of our legal rights early in the diplomatic process.
I think it is also important to note that Alberta’s oil sands represent a platform for GHG reductions, in that many innovative opportunities to reduce GHGs at this source are available, even if they are not currently economic. By comparison, as drilling for conventional crude goes deeper and deeper, the GHG intensity of conventional crude oil production increases and fewer near-economic opportunities to mitigate the GHG intensity increase for conventional crude exist.
I am an environmentalist. So I would like to see our governments move hard on the oil sands operators to provide incentives to them to innovate to cut GHGs. I also would like to see policies introduced in Canada that would encourage the single passenger vehicle fleet shift from gasoline to lower-GHG diesel fuel consumption. 80% of lifecycle GHGs for transportation fuels occur at the tailpipe of the vehicle, and diesel fuel GHGs—per kilometer of vehicle use—can be as much as 25% lower than gasoline fuel GHGs.
We should think of Alberta’s oil sands as the ideal diesel source and maximize Canada’s energy independence and efficiency by migrating the nation’s single passenger vehicle fleet from gasoline to diesel. This is a much more cost-effective and less limited GHG management measure, in Canada, than blending ethanol into gasoline.
And given Canada’s agriculture output and indigenous biomass supply, it makes much more sense for Canadian’s to specialize in biodiesel and diesel from algae than ethanol.
To achieve the gasoline-to-diesel switch, cost effectively, without increasing local air pollution, we need to see Canada’s ultra low sulphur diesel standard lowered to 10 ppm sulphur from the current standard of 15 ppm. On a side note, Shell’s refinery at Scotford Alberta already focuses on converting heavy and synthetic crude to diesel and already produces a product that is 10 ppm sulphur, or less.
The regulatory signals that are required to shift Canada to a “clean diesel” future could easily be built into Canada’s new CAFE standards for autos and trucks, but no such provisions appear in the current CAFE standards/proposals.
Please note that 100% of the transportation sector GHG “reductions” that have been achieved in Europe since 1990 derive from shifting the single passenger fleet from gasoline to diesel. This has led to air pollution challenges, and EU governments are only now considering regulating a 10 ppm ULSD standard.
Canada should get ahead of the curve.
Finally, please also note that one of the critical cost issues for algae-based biodiesel is CO2 supply. Biodiesel is produced by algae in reactors into which CO2 is pumped. Over time, the CO2 captured from Canadian gas processing plants, refineries and power plants should be seen to be our critical source of competitive advantage in the production of biodiesel from algae.
Aldyen Donnelly, July 9, 2010
(Jul. 8, 2010) Yesterday’s scorcher scorched wind power’s reputation and its long-term bottom line, too. Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
July 8, 2010
Yesterday’s scorcher scorched wind power’s reputation and its long-term bottom line, too. This simple chart demonstrates why no company can make a profit supplying wind power to the electricity system without government subsidies, and why no society can count on wind power when the power is most needed.
The wind blew at its best in Ontario yesterday between midnight and 1 am (the first column in the chart), producing 214 megawatt-hours (1000 kilowatts to one megawatt) that hour. If wind was operating in a free-market electricity economy, it would have only earned $36.85 per megawatt that hour, or one-third to one-quarter the value of power during peak hours.
Over the next few hours, its next best hours for the day, wind continued to fetch very low real prices.
Then, when power prices soared along with demand as society got to work, the wind turbines went to sleep. The peak production of 214 megawatts dropped to as little as 11 and never rose above 60. To put these numbers in perspective, when Ontario needed the wind most, wind was producing as little as one twentieth of 1% of Ontario’s needs –essentially nothing. Even in its best hour, wind only met 1.21% of Ontario’s needs, and that’s because other, more flexible forms of generation, scaled back their production (unlike hydro or fossil fuel generation, wind is not dispatchable).
Even had wind been able to continue producing at its rate of 214 megawatts, it would have met less than 1% of Ontario’s peak needs. Not that 214 megawatts is all that good, in any case. In that first hour, wind was operating at under 20% of its own capacity. It has better days, when the wind blows stronger and longer, but not enough of them to make wind economical.
Because wind systems will always have days when they will contribute essentially nothing, and because society will not want power blackout on those days, the only prudent course for the managers of the electricity grid is to value wind’s capacity at essentially nothing. That means other types of generating plants will always be needed to back up any wind that’s built to supply the power grid, making wind even more uneconomical, and more nonsensical as a power source to be relied upon.
(July 8, 2010) Michael Trebilcock reveals the poor performance of wind power during Ontario’s recent heat wave. Continue reading
Long-term global cooling began in 2002, according to a just-released study in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed publication produced at Harvard-Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics. Man-made global warming was real and dangerous, the study finds, but the danger has passed.
The study, authored by Qing-Bin Lu, a rising star at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, explains why climate models have been so spectacularly wrong in trying to tie the global warming of the last half of the 20th century to CO2 — the climate modelers fingered the wrong culprit when they targeted CO2. The true culprits, Dr. Lu explains, were CFCs, the now banned substances that until the 1990s had been a refrigerant and propellant to products as diverse as air conditioners and hair spray cans.
Fortunately for the globe, environmentalists had CFCs banned because of their role in depleting the ozone layer, not realizing that the ban was simultaneously solving the global warming threat.
According to Dr. Lu, the phase-out of CFCs will be reversing the global warming effect by ushering in a 50 to 70-year period of global cooling.
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, July 7, 2010
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